Sunday, February 24, 2019

The GSMA is predicting a relatively fast uptake of 5G with 1.4 billion global 5G connections by 2025, accounting for more than 15 percent of the mobile market, and up from a predicted, up from about 200 million 5G connections in 2021.

In a new report, ‘Intelligent Connectivity: How the Combination of 5G, AI, Big Data and IoT Is Set to Change Everything,’ the GSMA highlights how 5G networks, artificial intelligence (AI), smart platforms and the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to transform the lives of citizens and businesses around the world.

"The combination of 5G, the IoT, Big Data and AI will impact almost every aspect of our daily lives from the way we consume entertainment to the "way in which we learn and interact with colleagues - all underpinned by ubiquitous hyper-connectivity, commented Mats Granryd, Director General, GSMA. “The fusion of these transformative technologies will drive fundamental changes and intelligently connect everyone and everything to better future."

Vodafone and Telecom Italia (TIM) announced a 5G active network sharing pact that expands on their existing passive sharing agreement.

Also, the companies are considering a combination of their respective passive towers located in Italy into a single entity.

With reference to the Active Sharing Project, Vodafone and TIM intend to enter into an agreement that would enable them to jointly roll-out 5G infrastructure. The Active Sharing Project would support a faster deployment of 5G over a wider geographic area, at a lower cost.

Vodafone and TIM also intend to consider active network sharing for their existing 4G networks, in order to support 5G active network sharing.

Luigi Gubitosi, CEO, TIM, said: “This partnership will allow our customers to enter the 5G revolution faster and deeper, while at the same time making the best use of both companies’ resources. We believe that network sharing is key to do more, effectively and better for the benefit of our clients and all stakeholders, in view of the process of change that will be triggered by the launch of 5G in the years to come and that will be paramount for the development and digitalization of our Country”

KT has selected Cisco to transition its network architecture to better manage upcoming 5G traffic with advanced routing and automation software, intelligent analytics and machine learning. Specifically, KT has rolled out a new 5G mobile network platform with automated and virtualized technologies on Mobile Edge Cloud, featuring Mobile Packet Core, network slicing, segment routing, control and user plane separation (Remote-CUPS). The new architecture with Remote-CUPS is designed to serve reliable, scalable, flexible and low-latency network services. The virtualized mobile packet platform is designed to remotely manage traffic at scale and accelerates packet processing to meet the requirements of commercial 5G services with high throughput and low-latency network services.

“As the global leader in 5G, KT is aligned with innovative technology partners like Cisco that can design and launch commercial 5G services focused on ultra-low latency as the world’s first CUPS architecture use in combination with the strong foundation of IP network hardware, software and cloud-powered technologies” said Su-Kil Lee, Senior Vice President of Network Research Technology Support Unit, KT Corp.

SoftBank is deploying Cisco's Segment Routing IPv6 (SRv6) networks nationwide to build a future network architecture. Cisco says current mobile networks are deployed as divided networks, with several layers and complicated control plane processing, which makes it difficult to respond to strict quality requirements like in the case of 5G. Deploying SRv6 in a 5G mobile network simplifies network layers and integrates user plane functions from end-to-end with only IPv6 protocol, making things simple, controllable, and flexible.

Sprint is relying on the Cisco Network Convergence System 540 router series, which is capable of tripling backhaul network capacity and delivering 100G connectivity into the core transport network, and the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator for performance optimization and network automation.

This will enable enterprises to leverage the performance of 5G when using services such as network slicing and mobile edge computing.

“These solutions highlight what a transformative platform 5G will be for enterprises,” said Shawn Hakl, senior vice president, Business Products, Verizon. “Cisco has been a close technology partner in driving SD-WAN based transformation in campus and branch environments, and we look forward to bridging those same best practices to mobile devices.”

“We’re excited to partner with Verizon to take the next step in SD-WAN. 5G is a transformational technology, and when combined with Cisco SD-WAN, users’ application experience can be better than ever before,” said Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Networking Business, Cisco.“Verizon’s new Mobile SD-WAN will help enterprise customers quickly and easily transition to 5G, giving them an edge as we embrace the next generation of mobile connectivity.”

It is bluntly not true that if a certain vendor is held back then 5G rollouts in Europe will be delayed and costs will rise, said Rajeev Suri, CEO of Nokia, speaking at a press event ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Taking the example of current 5G rollouts underway in the United States, Suri said that it is illogical to assume that timely 5G rollouts in Europe are dependent on one vendor. Europe is likely to face to 5G rollout constraints from spectrum availability, which will play out over several years.

Suri also stated that Nokia has the technology and industrial capacity to meet whatever commercialization demands that mobile operators require.

Suri went on to give 5 predictions about 5G

1. Security will become (even more) non-negotiable
2. Operators will start to make money from 5G especially from enterprise services
3. 5G will uncork global productivity
4. 5G will grow and grow for the next decade
5. 6G - apart from researchers at Bell Labs and certain politicians, there's no need to talk about 6G when so much is yet to be accomplished in 5G.

Cisco is working with Google Station to bring improved Wi-Fi infrastructure to public transit locations.

Google Station, which got underway a few years ago in a partnership with railways in India, is a free service to the public supported with a revenue share with the venue based on the ability to monetize the service. Google operates the network and provides quality assurance support.

Google Station is currently active in India, Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

“We chose to work with Cisco on the Google Station initiative because they offer the networking technology, finance capabilities and global reach to enable sustainable public Wi-Fi,” said Mahesh Bhalerao, global director of partnerships, Next Billion Users at Google. “We share the belief that making Wi-Fi truly sustainable is an important puzzle piece in solving global connectivity issues.”

Redis Labs, the home of Redis and provider of Redis Enterprise, raised $60 million in Series E financing led by a new investor, Francisco Partners, a leading global technology-focused private equity firm.

Redis Labs was founded in 2011 by Ofer Bengal (CEO) and Yiftach Shoolman (CTO) around the promise of open source Redis, to deliver instant experience to modern applications at any scale, by building their datasets with native data structures and serving their applications requests directly from memory. In July 2015, Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, joined the company as leader of open source development. The company has now raised $146 million in total funding to-date. With these funds, the company plans to accelerate its global go-to-market execution, invest further in the enthusiastic Redis community, and continue its leadership in delivering the highest performing, most efficient database platform for modern applications.

“The impact of the Redis platform is being experienced everywhere as enterprises look to modernize or build new applications,” said Ofer Bengal, co-founder and CEO at Redis Labs. “This financing enables us to accelerate our strategy to deliver the fastest and most efficient database to the world and enable instant experiences for any modern application.”

The user experience is the ultimate test of network performance. For many applications, this often comes down to the lag after clicking and before the screen refreshes. We can trace the packets back from the user's handset, through the RAN, mobile core, metro transport, and perhaps long-haul optical backbone to a cloud data center. However, even if this path traverses the very latest generation infrastructure, if it ends up triggering a search in...

Cisco is predicting that mobile networks will support more than eight billion personal mobile devices and four billion IoT connections, up from nine billion such connections at the end of 2017.

Some other top observations and predictions:

5G connections will represent over three percent of total mobile connections (more than 422 million global 5G devices and M2M connections) and will account for nearly 12 percent of global mobile data traffic.

By 2022, the average 5G connection (22 GB/month) will generate about 3X more traffic than the average 4G connection (8 GB/month).

Nokia announced two additions to its AirScale small cells portfolio that extend the high performance of 5G both indoors and outdoors and support a wide range of use cases.

A new compact millimeter wave (mmWave) radio supports 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands to provide extreme high-capacity for the busiest traffic locations, such as airports, stadiums and busy pedestrian zones. It allows 180-degree, 360-degree and multi-band deployments to provide flexible coverage that meets mmWave radio signal attenuation challenges. It offers support for eCPRI connectivity to a distributed data center provides high capacity fronthaul.

A new 5G pico Remote Radio Head for the Nokia AirScale Indoor Radio System enables an upgrade of indoor coverage to 5G without replacing installed hardware, even in complex buildings such as hospitals and shopping malls. The new 5G pico Remote Radio Head supports sub-6 GHz. It is deployable on an existing Distributed Antenna System. It provides high 4 x 250 mW output power for a wide coverage area. In addition, a new dual port Ethernet extender allows pico Remote Radio Heads to be located up to 200m away from the smart HUB for even greater deployment flexibility.

Mark Atkinson, Head of 5G and Small Cells of Nokia said: "Small cells are perfectly suited for using 5G mmWave and mid-bands to deliver very high capacity to support the busiest traffic areas and ensure subscribers always enjoy the highest quality services. We are building on our small cells leadership to enable operators to deploy almost any scenario of 4G indoor and outdoor capacity and coverage that can be upgraded to 5G New Radio using a choice of spectrum bands."

Nokia unveiled its new FastMile 5G Gateway for residential and business Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) rollouts.

Optus is testing the FastMile 5G indoor gateway in a live network to simultaneous stream multiple 4K video services to select residential customers in Australia.

The indoor device connects wirelessly to the mobile network using either 3GPP compliant 5G New Radio (NR) or 4G signals. It offers carrier aggregation capabilities and can deliver peak speeds of 1 Gbps.

Nokia said its FastMile 5G Gateway maximizes spectral assets and uses the industry's highest gain (11dBi) antenna to deliver up to twice the indoor coverage, three times the downlink capacity and five times the uplink capacity compared to traditional designs.

Working Group Two (WG2), which is a new venture backed by Telenor Group and Digital Alpha (a financial fund supported by Cisco) announced a wholesale cloud-managed mobile network platform that will run both control and user plane on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The WG2 platform includes Cisco’s virtualized Ultra Packet Core, delivering 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile services, hosted on AWS.

WG2 said its platform allows mobile operators and enterprises to create and monetize a new breed of business and consumer mobile services that control the network through a simple cloud-based API.

“WG2 believes that AWS infrastructure and Cisco packet core can provide enhanced scalability, security, and redundancy. Working with AWS gives us agility and execution speed – capabilities we believe are becoming more important than the scale and size of the team. While still early on our journey, we have proven that the speed of development, cost and pace of innovation is radically better than if we had taken traditional technology choices,” said Erlend Prestgard, CEO, Working Group Two.

“WG2 enables service providers to maximize their network investments by offering new revenue streams at lower costs, with lower risk. The collaboration between WG2, AWS, Cisco, and Telenor is designed to unlock the promises of network transformation and differentiated user experience,” said Jonathan Davidson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco.

“Telenor is proud to have incubated WG2 in the early phases of the project and is excited to follow WG2's journey both as a customer, partner and an investor. WG2's ability to leverage cloud infrastructure has impacted our own strategic thinking and technology transformation. As their first customer, we can see how small and agile teams can achieve impressive output when leveraging cloud infrastructure. We look forward to how this collaboration can create an innovation velocity, challenging traditional industry standards,” said Ruza Sabanovic, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Telenor Group.

“WG2’s cloud platform including Cisco’s virtualized packet core represents a next generation architecture for mobile network operators to provide superior flexibility, scalability, and performance over traditional hardware-based networks. Today, operators across the world are transforming their infrastructure to leverage dynamic cloud scalability for both the control and user plane. This will serve as the foundation for high speed low latency networks, enabling an accelerated ability to deliver new innovative applications for end customers and cost effectively scale their network,” said, Jean-Philippe Poirault, Head of AWS Telecom, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Pivotal Commware is the creator of Holographic Beam Forming (HBF), an antenna technology that expands the capacity and spectral efficiency of the 5G ecosystem, from base stations to network and subscriber devices. The Echo 5G product line leverages HBF’s lowest cost, size, weight and power consumption profile to help network operators improve performance, lower costs and compete in new markets.